That's -30- for us
Berkeleyan bids adieu to print
05 October 2009
BERKELEY — This is the 230th issue of the Berkeleyan produced during my editorship. It is also the very last edition — not just for me, but for the paper itself.
It's my farewell because the position of Berkeleyan editor has been eliminated — one small part of Public Affairs' cost-reduction effort during these most difficult economic times. The print edition of the Berkeleyan is "departing" too, because it requires the full attention of four writer/editors and a designer to produce a paper of appropriate heft and seriousness on a regular basis, and those resources are no longer available. Hence, this issue winds up nearly a quarter-century of continuous print publication on behalf of campus faculty and staff, as the transition to a less-resource-intensive online format gets under way.
The loss of any newspaper is a commonplace event nowadays, of course: At the University of California, few campuses continue to produce print periodicals for faculty and staff. Fortunately, unlike the information vacuum that accompanies the death of a metro daily, there will be no significant shortfall of employee news and information at Berkeley. The remaining members of the Berkeleyan editorial staff are being integrated into the daily work of the UC Berkeley NewsCenter, a fully mature online portal for anyone who wants to know what's up on the University of California's flagship campus.
By way of farewell, we thought about the best way to sum up the past 25 years of coverage: a lavishly illustrated timeline of events? a collection of our favorite headlines? a subtle mention of the two national medals — gold and silver — won by our writing staff since 2006 in the annual CASE awards for higher-education publishing? [Done.-Ed.] Finally, we elected to let the words themselves speak to our purpose and intentions, even if we could select only a relative few from among the millions we've published since 1985.
We're far from the only campus unit to absorb budget reductions in the form of departing colleagues. The rebuilding, here as elsewhere, is just getting started: See, for example, our page 1 story this issue on the significant restructuring going on in the research-administration arena. In the interim, the once and future staff of the Berkeleyan — in whatever form it may ultimately take —join the committed faculty and staff of UC Berkeley in looking forward to more prosperous times ahead.
—Jonathan King, Editor [2002-09]
The Berkeleyan